Enlightenment in California

Thanks to everyone for making our inaugural event of The Enlightenment Society for the College of the United States a wonderful success!

Integration (and I don't mean the neighborhood type)

What college graduates do with the information they've learned is crucial for their competitive edge, because there is so much world-wide competition. Just one example: tax accountants in the U.S. are competing with highly trained accountants in India, who work for thousands and thousands less, and can now do U.S. tax returns on-line at secure websites.

Contrary to the current protectionist mood, this is a good development, in the long run. More work, done less expensively leaves the customer with money to invest or spend on something else. Ultimately, more jobs and wealth can be created, and everyone becomes richer, even the poorest person in the country. Even the poorest in the U.S. have running water, TV's and telephones.

But it means U.S. workers must become ever more creative and adaptable to keep high-paying jobs.

Broad knowledge and the capability to learn, combined with the ability to deftly integrate new material into one's repertoire, enables a person to be professionaly versatile. Recruiters now even use the word "Versatilist" to describe those who can easily move from one job and field to another, and master them. 

Consequently, it is imperative that education must be about how to think, create, and integrate knowledge in new ways. An excellent liberal arts program develops these qualities in students, even after a lifetime of lectures. This is the factor that many fail to grasp when they rush to specialize at college.

In the 19th and early 20th century, lower schools used classic texts as their standard works. Young students were reading Aristotle, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Darwin. These profound works open the mind to the great questions of life, excellent reasoning, important ideas that influence contemporary culture, and superior thinking and writing. 

Further, they tend to span subject matter, often examining philosophical, ethical, scientific, and artistic issues in one work. They represent excellent examples of integrated thinking.

Developing broad knowledge aids integration. Before valuable information and ideas can be stored in the mind's subconscious, they have to pass through the conscious mind, which usually can handle only about seven discreet items at any one time (see George A. Miller's 1956 psychological classic "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information"). If you've ever wondered why you need a list to remember what you have to do, here's the reason, and it's on of the reasons for our limited attentional resources.

Ideas--abstractions--are the primordial human inventions that circumvent this limitation, because ideas incorporate myriad data into a singel audio-visual concrete, a word or symbol. All instances of babies are integrated into the idea of "baby," and you can apply what you know about babies to any individual baby you encounter. Voila! You've saved a lot of time and energy.

Ultimately, the integration of simple ideas like those of colors or types of animals, into more abstract groupings like "mammal" makes the human mind extremely powerful. Imagination and integration work together to produce the torrent that is human creativity. Integration of information into ideas, and actions into skills, is the psychologically economical way to use our limited conscious resources when thinking and solving problems.

The person who is a master of the careful, fact-based integration of knowledge is a highly effective thinker. And integrating facts and ideas from one field of study to another, highly disparate field, is the essence of creativity. More on that in my next post.

Education and Liberty

Check out this new blog, Education and Liberty, written by some Socratic Practice and free market economic fans.

Acton MBA

I was recently reminded about this program, the motto of which is "Learn how to learn. Learn how to make money. Learn how to live a life of meaning." 

The more I read about this innovative MBA program in Entrepreneurship, the more impressed I am. It fuses philosophical reflection with real-world action to help individuals create their purpose in life. That's what I think education should be about. 

And, even better, they see business as a creative, productive activity that can have lofty ends.

Children Beaten in Chicago Public Schools

A CBS Chicago investigative report found these horrors. Not a surprise to me, given what I've heard from people who volunteered or worked at various Chicago public schools.

I'm sure it's one of the reasons why a large number of the students at my Council Oak Montessori School have parents who are Chicago Public School teachers - they don't want this happening to their children.

(Hat tip to John Enright.)

Lectures in Their Proper Place

In my previous post, I reported that MIT was getting rid of lectures in their physics classes.

In the New York Times article about this change, Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who directs a science education initiative at the University of British Columbia is quoted as saying that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”

“But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”

This relates to the problem of attentional resources I discussed on November 21st.

If organized well, lectures can distill a vast amount of information down to a few principles and key examples. A lecture can be an economical introduction to a subject. The best lectures essentialize the subject matter conveyed by the lecture.

However, as a method, lectures are designed to be easy for the teacher, not the student. They allow the teacher to recount his or her knowledge without feedback or interrupting questions and side issues from the listener. Although sometimes necessary, lectures are usually a difficult way to learn because they frequently run counter to human learning tendencies.

For several reasons, students must exert an enormous amount of effort to stay focused on what the speaker says during lectures. A lecture requires the learner to mostly listen and look a little. Unlike learning methods that make learning easy, the lecture does not engage the whole mind, including vivid perceptions and imagination, or the body of the student. Listening and looking during a lecture involves little sensory-motor work, which normally helps cement learning in memory.

One of the reasons visual aids such as Microsoft^® Office PowerPoint^® are preferred for lectures is because they offer sensory stimulations, providing at least some perceptual imagery to associate with the ideas being conveyed. Although, like books, lectures can have illustrations, the student cannot study the illustrations in a lecture as long as he or she wants.

Human interaction usually helps to increase interest as well as physically engage the student, but during a lecture, there is very little interaction between student and teacher. Often the lecture is aimed at a large or general audience and thus cannot address individual student goals, interests and comprehension difficulties.

A student cannot stop the lecture to ask a question or request a further, clarifying explanation. Once confused, the student finds the rest of the lecture very difficult if not impossible to follow. Consequently, students often miss the important points and substantial content of the lecture.

In a lecture format, the best teachers attempt to address human learning needs by weaving their information into a story, incorporating drama, character, values, passion, meaning, purpose, a climax and resolution. Winston Churchill was a master at this. This method utilizes human tendencies to search for meaning and purpose, to connect knowledge acquired to personal circumstances, and to remember people, places and things more easily than abstract ideas.

Excellent lecturers use plenty of concretes to make the information vivid and connected to real experience and, at least in imagination, to stir perceptual memory and bodily feelings of the student. Imaginative work and bodily feelings help the student feel much more engaged in the material. Exceptional lecturer MIT physics professor Walter Lewin spends 30 hours and three practice trials developing each of the lectures for his remarkable class.

The best learners can gain from almost any lecture; they come to a lecture motivated to learn for their own reasons. They expend extra effort in imagining their own examples in order to concretize the ideas they’re hearing. As they listen, they maintain an internal dialogue of questions with the lecturer, noting what they don’t understand and with what they take issue. They also tend to seek answers to their questions after the lecture.

Many teachers recognize that this kind of student is rare and usually has high intelligence, strong intellectual ambition, and great self-motivation. For the most part, traditional education methods do not nurture internal motivation and inherent interest in acquiring knowledge—qualities essential in the new global economy.

A long school career of lectures, drills, memorization, and teaching methods out of tune with learning needs usually turns most students away from enthusiastic learning at school. They are only too often motivated mainly by external rewards of grades, adult approval, superior social position and the acquisition of credentials.

Unfortunately, lectures are so difficult to pay attention to, and psychologically painful for most students, that students work hard to avoid them. During lectures, any younger students merely goof around; consequently, they learn that they are “bad” and “undisciplined.” They are expected to know how to force their attention on boring material.

Students attempting to pass their courses seek low-energy ways to fulfill requirements while maximizing grades, such as the use of tape recordings, buying others’ lecture notes, or passing multiple choice tests without attending lectures.

These students aren’t inherently bad, they are responding to the high psychological costs of traditional education in a psychologically economical way. They more profitably spend their limited attentional resources elsewhere.

Sadly, they often feel guilt, frustration and anger for failing to live up to the traditional classroom’s expectations, with a nagging disappointment for what they’ve missed—or should have gotten—from education. Many students desperately need help to become active learners, interested in the material and in charge of their own education.

Liberating Lectures

"At MIT, Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard" - and it's a good thing.

"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent."

Physics professors from MIT and around the country initiated this change because students weren't learning.

(Hat tip to Don Hauptman.)

What does education have to do with Bush hatred and Obama euphoria?

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz argued that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are two sides of the same coin - the triumph of passion over reason. He laments the current, deformed thinking of our intellectual classes.

"As Hamilton would have supposed, the susceptibility of political judgment to corruption by interest and ambition is as operative in our time as it was in his. What has changed is that those who, by virtue of their education and professional training, would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton's lesson of moderation are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.

"Bush hatred and Obama euphoria are particularly toxic because they thrive in and have been promoted by the news media, whose professional responsibility, it has long been thought, is to gather the facts and analyze their significance, and by the academy, whose scholarly training, it is commonly assumed, reflects an aptitude for and dedication to systematic study and impartial inquiry.

Unfortunately, Mr. Berkowitz comes close, but misses the mark, in identifying the defining factors which led to our current, sorry State.

Philosophers from Kant to Marcuse and later spent years gutting reason of its power to arrive at objective judgments, and promulgating this view through the Academy. Without this ability, what individual can stand, with certainty, against the crowd? What's left but emotionally based alliances?

Reason becomes rationalization, justifying intellectual passion-stoking - and making collectivist purposes so much easier to advance. This view of reason is what what separates our current thinking from that of the Founders, and why so few intellectuals today reflect the “education and professional training” of Hamilton’s times.

Are you controlled by irrational behavior?

See a fascinating lecture by behavioral economist Daniel Ariely from Duke University, on "irrational" behavior. (He means, irrational in the sense of economic self-interest maximizing; I know this a popular meaning among economists, but I'm not happy with it, which is why I've put it in quotes.)

To me, it's one long argument for teaching people how to have a higher level of awareness and thinking about everything they do.Check your premises!

(Hat tip to Anja Hartleb-Parson.)

A Method Rooted in Independence

Encouraging a child's independence is deeply rooted in the Montessori Method - one of the reasons I love it.

Beginning with the very young children (3-6 year olds), students work individually on materials which develop their senses and motor abilities and their independent powers of observation, analysis, and integration - the essence of reasoning. Group work is not encouraged for the very young, who are just forming their minds, as it is in Progressive schools. However, children can work together if they want to.

Furthermore, well-trained Montessori directresses are very respectful of individuals, their styles of learning and living, their interests, and their ideas.

(We call Montessori teachers "directresses" or "directors" because they more guide the children than instruct them, the materials do the instruction).

Group work become a bigger component of the curriculum as the children get close to adolescence; as students develop, they need to learn how to work with other people to prepare them for adult life.

However, the children are encouraged to work at their individual best: not compete with each other. Human beings are naturally competitive, but it is very distracting to develop self-motivated learning habits when competition is emphasized, especially for the very young.

The ugly head of social pressure rears up to tear the young mind and heart away from the inherent joy of learning.

All these elements serve to encourage even the most timid child to be independent in their thoughts and actions, a welcome respite from the kind of social pressure I talked about in my previous post.

That's not to say that Montessori schools are immune to social pressure - I've seen plenty of teachers promoting their scientifically unsubstantiated or unexamined views on the environment and nutrition, among other topics, through special projects and lessons.

Fortunately, the many aspects of Montessori which encourage factual observation and reasoning mitigate against this.

Los Comprachicos - Parents Indoctrinating Children

My friend, Donald, received this disturbing story from a friend of his:

"On Monday 01/19/09 my daughter baby sat at the neighbors', right next door…

It was an Obama victory party for children. All the participants live nearby.

As reported:

Daughter had to help the kids decorate Obama cookies and muffins.

There were "find Obama" games (?!!!) and, quizzes with questions like:

What is: Obama favorite food?, Favorite music? .......

Then a photo sessions with a full size cutoff of the "ONE". Everyone took turns posing, hugging and kissing the cardboard likeness.

They gathered all the children in the living room and sang some previously rehearsed Obama praising tunes, such as:

♫I've a crush ♬ on Obama♪....

Then the adults took turn for the children.

It seems that they did not perform, this song.

Finally, a joyous Obama conga line through the house.

A just off-the-plane Italian au pair stood by beffudled. Muttering "we not do that in my country!".

[My daughter] came back shaking her head.

She mused about similar events with McCain or Bush songs.

Interestingly, [she] wondered why she was needed as she mostly stood watching around along with the au pair. She concluded that the "mom" just wanted to give her some "business." ...

...Quote of the day:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened.”

- Norman Thomas, Socialist Party presidential candidate, 1940, 1944 and 1948 explaining why he quit running for president. "

That's the end of Donald's friend's commentary.

It seems that parents and teachers all over the country were organizing children to participate in Obama adulation. It puts me in mind of an article by Ayn Rand called "The Comprachicos."

"Los Comprachicos" were evil people who monstrously disfigured children to become performers and beggars - as in the recent movie "Slum Dog Millionaire." In the article, she compares what the Comprachicos did to the social pressure to conform put on toddlers and very young children in Progressive school classrooms.

She argues that such pressure is cognitively maiming, making it difficult for all but the strongest to maintain their independence. Unlike the original Comprachicos, however, the scars from this "operation" are invisible, all on the inside.

Today, this "operation" goes on at all levels of education. The videos of organized presidential adulation are a testament to what's happening.

"To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason," Ayn Rand.

(Hat tip to Donald and his friend.)

Intolerance on Inauguration Day

At Mason district schools near Dayton, Ohio, criticisms and caricatures of the incoming or outgoing Presidents will not be allowed today, based on whether they make others feel “unwelcome or uncomfortable,” reports the Dayton Daily News.

So much for free speech in the public schools. Political correctness deep-sixes tolerance once again. (Hat tip to John Welsh.)

Text Book Bias

Fox News interviews Larry Schweikart from the University of Dayton on bias in textbooks, with some hairy examples! Enlightening info on the building of American railroads.

'Virtual Drug Testing' versus Education

Bob Sechler in today's Wall Street Journal reports that GE Global Research, Simcyp Ltd. and Pfizer, among others, have "developed software that simulates the complex chemistry of living organisms" in order to run virtual tests of new drugs.

At first, I could hardly believed this worked, because the human body is so complex, but, apparently, they're able to use this technology to weed out "sure-fire losers." "...high speed processors and other technological advancements are enabling relatively small-scale simulations--of particular organs, for instance--to be integrated into increasingly complete software-based 'virtual humans'..." It's saving the companies millions and reducing human risk.

What an amazing application of reason and creativity!

But it made me sad to think of the field of education, in contrast, which mainly uses the same methods it did 100 years ago.

Sure, schools continue to adopt new material technologies, like the Internet, web-casting, and white boards, all well and good. Hopefully, the new Prado Museum Google Earth project will be tapped, also. But in terms of method - lectures, tests, memorization of data - are centuries old!

We're just damn lucky that the researchers who graduate from mostly traditional schools are able to develop such a high level of creativity.

(I'm terribly sorry, after 20 minutes of searching on the Journal's website, I was not able to find the article - saw it in hardcopy only.)

First Hand Observation of Prado Museum Details

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports another Google innovation:

"Spain's Prado Museum has teamed up with Google Earth for a project that allows people to zoom in on the gallery's main works, even on details not immediately discernible to the human eye.

Getty Images
Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas.""

What a fabulous new way to learn!! Here's some more info:

"The initiative, announced Tuesday, is the first of its kind involving an art museum. It involves 14 of the Prado's paintings, including Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas," Francisco de Goya's "Third of May" and Peter Paul Rubens's "The Three Graces."

"There is no better way to pay tribute to the great masters of the history of art than to universalize knowledge of their works using optimum conditions," Prado director Miguel Zugaza said.

Google Spain director Javier Rodriguez Zapatero said the images now available on the Internet were 1,400 times as clear as what would be rendered with a 10-megapixel camera.

"With Google Earth technology it is possible to enjoy these magnificent works in a way never previously possible, obtaining details impossible to appreciate through first-hand observation," he said."

A New College for Bureaucrats

This New York Times article reports that former teacher Chris Asch is tapping Michelle Obama to build a new college for bureaucrats.

“The Public Service Academy can be Barack Obama’s Peace Corps,” Mr. Asch said. “He needs to take advantage of this moment when people are recognizing the importance of government and build institutions that will last.”

We're starting to sound more and more like France! (Hat tip to Don Hauptman.)

The Oddity of College Admissions

Imagine you're shopping for a car and you're considering a Toyota or a Ford SUV.

But most of the information you can get about them is:

1. What executives at other car companies think about these vehicles,
2. The average driving skills test score of those who bought them.

You decide on a Toyota, you fill out the paperwork to buy one - but then you have to HOPE that the Toyota company will let you!

Sounds nuts, doesn't it?

That's the apt way that Diane Auer Jones summed up the college admissions process for selective colleges during a speech at at the National Association of Scholars conference yesterday.

Schooling and creativity

Creativity researcher Ken Robinson gives an incisive - and funny - talk about how current education kills creativity, which is crucial in today's world. (Hat tip to Gennady Shenker.)

How a Creative Artist Coped with Bad Schooling

You've got to see this video of Willard Wigan and his microscopic sculptures. His comments about schooling are heart-wrenching, but inspiring. (Hat tip to Karen Minto.)

Risk-Averse Parenting and Entrepreneurialism

Interesting post at The Austrian Economists blog. (Hat-tip to Pat Peterson at the Jefferson Club.)

Author Steve Horowitz said:

"How important is it to a classical liberal order that children be raised in ways that encourage entrepreneur-like independence?  Aside from the more narrow questions of policy, can a liberal order function with risk-averse citizens who are less likely to sieze entrepreneurial opportunities?  Is this part of the broader role that the family has in transmitting the rules and values of the Great Society?  What, if anything, can we do if parents are failing in that task?"

To the first question: the history of culture makes it clear that the way children are raised deeply affects their entrepreneurial independence. Tom Sowell makes this case in Ethnic America, tracing the values and practices of Jewish and Chinese immigrants which so often enable their entrepreneurship. 

Further, 100 years of experience with Montessori education demonstrates that children can learn the skills for a creative, independent, and professionally and socially successful life, if they are educated in the right environment. 

Aside from all the individual children I've seen blossom enormously (often, after extremely inauspicious beginnings), it's interesting to note the honor role of unusually creative, independent people who were Montessori students:

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google

Julia Child, chef, author, and TV personality

Anne Frank, author

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

Will Wright, Sim City

These are but a few. 

Writers and thinkers like Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, are recognizing the superiority of Montessori education to preparing children for today's global economy. (Hat tip to Mark Berger of Corvallis Montessori.)

Now that the holiday whirlwind is over, I'll take up the discussion I left off in my November 21st post, and report more on why that is the case.